Why tech bros are obsessed with "taste"
& more recent writing
This is the work newsletter of Kyle Chayka. You may know me from my column as a staff writer at The New Yorker; my most recent book, Filterworld; my first book, The Longing for Less; or maybe even IRL. I also run the newsletter One Thing, which is about quality in culture. I’m on Bluesky, X, and Instagram.
As a writer, it’s a joy when you notice a story that’s just squarely within your sensibility. Things crystallize — the world seems to tell you that you have to write about this thing. That’s how I felt when I noticed that Silicon Valley seemed obsessed with the word “taste,” in social-media posts and podcast clips and entrepreneurial exhortations. In the age of AI, personal taste is all that matters, because robots will do everything besides decide what to do! Or that’s the argument. I critiqued the concept in my latest column for The New Yorker.
A.I. companies need to associate themselves with taste precisely because their tools are not very palatable, much less cool, to anyone outside of Silicon Valley. Many people view A.I. tools as a threat—to their livelihoods, to their futures, to their senses of self. Few, whom I know, see them as individuality-affirming life-style choices. We might call what’s going on now “taste-washing,” an attempt to give anti-humanist technologies a veneer of liberal humanism. The Times perpetuated this mythmaking when it launched a poll last week asking users to read passages drawn from well-known works of literature, and passages generated by A.I., and choose which they preferred stylistically. Nearly fifty per cent of participants preferred the texts written by artificial intelligence. Is A.I. now so adept that it can write like Hilary Mantel? Another conclusion might be that the online ecosystem has become so polluted—so fragmented, deceptive, overstimulating, ersatz—that it has warped our ability to exercise taste at all.
I’ve been writing about taste and technology for a long time, not least in my 2024 book Filterworld. It first came to the fore in my 2018 essay for Racked (now published under Vox), “Style Is an Algorithm.” Back then, I argued that algorithmic feeds were automating style and undermining our personal senses of taste, which is to say, the pieces of culture we individually like and identify with. At that time, I didn’t know TikTok’s For You feed was going to hypnotize us and then generative A.I. was going to automate not only the consumption but the production of culture in ever more generic forms. Taste was already under attack; I think it’s vital now to actively think about your own taste and separate it from the influence of digital machinery. (That’s kind of what my next book is about, but moving past deconstructing the technology into rebuilding the human experience.)
Other recent columns
War in the Age of the Online “Information Bomb”: The war in Iran is documented online in a mess of influencer vlogs, AI-generated clips, and meme propaganda.
Global conflict has played out over social media for many years now, dating back to the Twitter-based organizing of the Arab Spring, but the current warfare in the Middle East marks a new level of saturation. Personal footage mingles with official releases from state militaries that are now proficient in the language of the internet. Any clear hierarchy of trustworthy information remains elusive as on-the-ground videos come from all directions, and government agencies are as likely to post memes as anonymous online trolls.
Why You Hate Your Weather App: Do you miss Dark Sky as much as I do?? The founder is back with a new weather app, Acme, which I reviewed, delving into the difficulties of weather apps.
One of Acme’s advantages over its smaller competitors is that it generates its own, bespoke forecasts, comparing and merging the various data sources and predictions using machine learning, and adjusting for factors such as regional microclimates. The app also uses its own algorithm to determine which information to show a user at a given moment. A radar map will pop up at the top of the scroll, for instance, when inclement weather is predicted.
Some personal news
My wife Jess and I recently welcomed a beautiful baby! We’re having a great time in the soft haze of early parenthood. If you have any reading (or watching or listening) recommendations for this moment, please do send them along, or email your best bit of infancy advice.
And yet they buy so little art. What’s up with that?
Re: early parenthood. I cannot recommend enough The Intellectual Lives of Children by Susan Engle